Digging at the confluence of culture and everything else
The Problem of Evil – the incongruity of a being that is all powerful, all knowing, and all good with (unjustified) suffering in the world, is one of those philosophical debates that I am mostly bored with. The challenge of theodicy – finding an answer to that incongruity – has been attempted for thousands upon thousands of years. Yet it seems every week I find theists (but pretty much always Christians) and non-theists (but pretty much always former Christians) going at it like they’ve just discovered the last well in the desert. The persistence of the debate is not driven by new innovative debate, mind you. It’s the same arguments, with the same defenses, and the same scoffing from all sides. The simple conclusion is that its not really a philosophical debate so much as a tribal one, where truth is secondary to identity construction.
The thing is, I actually find the Problem of Evil easy to solve as a logic puzzle. I don’t think the logic in the following theodicy is original to me, but I’ve never read it in its original form, so I’ve taken to calling it the Virtual World Defense. It is, as follows:
I’ve been using this blog to forward culture-oriented thinking: a focus on the invisible webs of meaning that structure our identities and thoughts, with emergence and complexity as the rule. Implicitly, that means I reject the usual narratives we tell about ourselves and important lives: that our states are the result of reasoning and deep contemplation, or perhaps the intervention of a purpose driven external force. I mean, I don’t reject that totally. I believe that our wills are free enough, and I believe that our choices are real, even if they are also delimited and informed by culture. Who we are and what we think has a lot to do with what others are and what they think. Which causes some conflict when it comes to religious faith. There are mounds and mounds of data that suggest your religious identity is shaped profoundly by what religion you’re raised in, what the majority religion of the powerful in an area is, and the religion of your peers. For Christianity, there is also an overwhelming cultural backdrop that says that Christian religion is about faith, and faith is about the choice to believe in Truth.
I am, I suppose, stuck somewhere in the middle. Let me start at the beginning.
Read more of this post
A week and change ago, a group is Islamist militants called ISIS (or ISIL), stormed Mosul, Iraq, conquering considerable land while the Iraqi army fled. ISIS has since instituted brutal and repressive governance, murdered many Iraqis in religio-enthic cleansing, and has declared its intent to wage war in order to destroy rival religious shrines. They are now marching towards Baghdad and may have in fact started a regional war that will be temporally coterminous with a massive spree of ethnic cleansing.
Anytime something horrible happens in Iraq, you can count on the usual suspects saying the usual things and so they have. We’ve had two genres of column filling the papers and the blogs: “why we must militarily intervene in Iraq” and “how can you possibly consider military intervention in Iraq?!?!?!!” Even with the bias of being an interventionist in my heart-of-hearts, I’m pretty sure all of the slaughter creates a natural, even healthy impulse to intervene. I’m reminded of the famous lines of the serenity prayer.
God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
The courage to change the things I can,
And wisdom to know the difference.
You’ll note that the call for serenity is not a call for a hardened heart. It may not be wise to intervene in Iraq, but there is a particular cruelty in dismissing the case outright. Read more of this post
Last week, Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry went a little crazy after a bunch of well educated professional political reporters flipped out over the creepiness of David Brat’s use of the phrase “monopoly on the use of force” in reference to government. For those of you who were not paying attention during any of your studies that involve the modern state:
the concept of the state having “a monopoly on the [legitimate] use of force” is a quotation from the highly reputed and important German sociologist Max Weber, and is a concept that is absolutely basic to our modern understanding of the State. Anyone who has taken polisci 101 or sociology 101 or political philosophy 101 or history of ideas 101 ought to have encountered the phrase. It is about as offensive as saying that donuts have holes.
What followed was a fine rant from Gobry about not only how American schools have obviously failed to teach our students the basics, but we’ve failed to do the basics for all of the wrong reasons:
Nobody stops to ask what education is for, because the answer is implicitly accepted by all: an education is for getting a job. It is, in other words, for being a cog in the giant machine of post-industrial capitalism. It is, in other words, for the opposite thing that our forefathers wanted for us. I do not use these words lightly, but it is against–in the sense that a headwind is against a ship–the very foundations of our liberty and our civilization.
Gobry followed up today by prescribing a course of small group tutoring sessions, as many deep full book dives into Great Books as possible, and no exams. I’m not sure if he’s offering this as a marginal improvement in the pedagogy of the humanities, or a model for the remaking of all secondary schooling across multiple subjects as “liberal arts education” can mean either of those things in context. Maybe it doesn’t matter, since everything is tied together, and I don’t just mean the zero-sum game of pie division when it comes to education budgets and instructional time. Let me introduce two interlocking concepts to explain the why and the how of education: self-efficacy and cultural literacy. Read more of this post
I have trouble with Father’s Day. I mean, I shouldn’t. I’m part of three traditions that all honor parents in their own peculiar ways. I don’t really buy it anyway. Why are we honoring people for doing what they’re supposed to do? No one’s ever offered me an award for not beating my wife, nor for not stealing from the office, nor for not irresponsibly fathering and abandoning children. No one should. It is a basic obligation.
Parenthood is an obligation first and finally. No child is brought into the world due to their consent. Not one of us is alive because asked to be born, none of us consented to enter the lottery that determines our circumstances. Our lives begin in pain and terror. The cry of a helpless baby is not merely a request, it is a demand. Feed me! This is your fault! That fault is born by mother and father, and gender roles are accidents of history and efficiency in meeting that obligation.
That is a moral obligation, not a biological one. To end a pregnancy may require special intervention for a mother, but upon birth the instinctive bonds and hormonal imperatives are just one of many: food, safety, shelter, companionship. The demands of a child have only the power of shrill voices: blackmail of the heart, not of genetics. There will always be the chance to have another. Fathers can walk away long before the cries, before the belly’s swell, long before his biology begins to ask him to stay.
Sometimes, often even, morality isn’t enough to make fathers stay. The gratitude that we feel – that I feel – towards our own fathers and fathers worldwide does not come from them exceeding their basic moral responsibilities. It comes from a recognition that in the world-that-is fathers fail their moral responsibilities all the time. So we honor the better fathers in the world-that-is because the world-that-is is so far from the world-that-ought. If giving out cookies is the price we pay for less of that, then, well, that’s what we’re going to have to do.
My father never needed that cookie and never asked for it. No one takes his obligations with the same seriousness that my father does. I don’t know that he has done them well, but by God, he has done them. In a world of muddling through, my father never threw up his hands and asked for sympathy, no excuses for his fallibility. When he did wrong, it was because he thought he was right and when he learned otherwise, he tried to make amends. I learn more every day how extraordinary that really is, even if I now think (in imitation of him) that it is the very least that people should do.
Fathers and sons have complex relationships. It is truth not because it is written in the bedrock of humanity (genetic, spiritual or memetic) but because it has emerged again and again across time and space. We’re no exception. As a child I gave up on asking for affection and set my eyes on a higher prize, that of his respect. That’s driven me since in more ways that I’d care to admit, but I think ultimately for the better. We agree on nothing. Verily, we are disagreeable and that could not annoy the other more. He looks at me and he sees all his fears. I once looked at him and I saw mine. Now, I hope I finally see him clearly, a man who never shirks and never expects forbearance or praise or gratitude for simply doing his job. In the world-that-ought, it’d be the least. That makes it worth all the more in the world-that-is.
In this world of failures and excuses, he’s a specially great father indeed.
Earlier this week, a some very smart men wrote some silly things about education. One of them was Judge Rolf M. Treu in his tentative decision to strike down the teacher tenure system1 in Vergara v. California. Vergara is a public interest suit by nine students (or rather, their guardians) brought together by the 501(c)(3) organization Students Matter with the goal of striking down five statutes: the Permanent Employment Statute, the Written Charges Statute, the Correct and Cure Statute, the Dismissal Hearing Statute, and the Last-In-First-Out (LIFO) Statute. The plaintiff’s argument can be roughly distilled as follows:
Sounds good so far right? Unfortunately, not so much. Read more of this post
Common Core is in the news again, and as per usual the only thing that news reporters and pundits understand less than religion is education. So, some simple bullet points on what Common Core is and is not, and a little bit about why.
Common Core is not substantive education reform. Education reformers do not agree on much, but they spend most of their time arguing with each other about how to improve educational outcomes: basically, ensure that more students learn more stuff and that the stuff that they learn is important. As you can imagine, there is virulent disagreement about what qualifies as important and even how learning happens. Common Core, on the other hand, is actually short for Common Core State Standards Initiative which is exactly what it sounds like: an initiative to create common standards across the several states. So why doesn’t common State Standards qualify as substantive education reform?
Standards are educational goals, not curriculum, assessment, or teaching techniques. A standard is a goal set by an authority (usually by state law) of what students are expected to know and/or be able to do by the time they end a certain grade. That’s it. For example, from the Common Core mathematics standards:
CCSS.MATH.CONTENT.3.OA.A.1
Interpret products of whole numbers, e.g., interpret 5 × 7 as the total number of objects in 5 groups of 7 objects each. For example, describe a context in which a total number of objects can be expressed as 5 × 7.
From Michigan’s old mathematics standards:
Explore properties of operations (e.g., commutative and distributive properties) and give examples of how they use those properties.
Standards are stupid. No, really, they are. They tend to squeeze lesson plans into ridiculous contortions as teachers take a lesson they actually want to teach and bullshit a reason as to why it helps reach an education standard for one. There is just way too many of them for a class to handle, and they’re insensitive to changing facts on the ground. Teachers, as a class, tend to resent them.
But not that stupid. Having some sort of standard is the only way that we’ll ever be able to measure educational outcomes, whatever they are. Standards are how you get a 3rd grade teacher to work with a 4th grade teacher as a team, without them having to ever speak to each other or even be in the same building. Standards allow commonality of purpose.
Diversity in education is usually good, but with standards it is bad. Imagine for a moment that there was no uniformity at all to spelling. Not just regional variations, but everyone spelled words how they felt like it. Or for that matter, spoke their own language. Drove on whichever side of the street they felt like. Or the colors and positions of stop lights changed. That would suck, wouldn’t it? We need a shared baseline. If there were 51 different ways that stop lights worked every time you crossed an invisible line, you’d have a really hard time driving every time you moved, whether for work or school, or just life’s various travails.
Common Core is about taking the 51+ state standards and making 1 state standard. Before Common Core we still had standards. We had a lot of different standards, promulgated by the different states. Some may have been marginally better than others, but there were still standards everywhere. So, if we’re going to have standards, why not make them uniform? Did you know that commercial contracts (contracts for the buying and selling of stuff) in the US is all done under 51 copies of the same law? All of the states and D.C. have adopted the UCC, with some variations, because it is a good thing when people can buy and sell goods across state lines. Well, Common Core is the same principle but for student education. When a student moves from one state to another, they’re already at elevated risk for bad education outcomes because of the disruption in their life. Add on the possibility of having learned completely the wrong things for their grade level, and you may be pushing them back a grade or two on top of it. Having a common set of standards removes at least one burden from children who move, and some children have to move a lot. They tend to be poorer and/or the children of military men and women, and any assistance we can give them is worth it.
Common standards also help at the back-end. When students graduate from high school, whether they’re heading into the workforce, community college, or college, a high school diploma will mean at least the same achievement of standards, which will make it a lot easier for a student in Michigan to go to school in Oregon, if that’s what they choose to do. Getting students ready for further ed or the workforce isn’t everything a school has to do, but it is a big part of what the school has to do.
Look, the genius kid on his way to Harvard won’t benefit, or the child actress on her way to an acting career, and neither will the brilliant slacker who tops Forbes 500 before she hits 25. Common Core isn’t about them. Neither, really, is education reform. Most of them will be fine pretty much no matter what we do, so we ought to be focusing at the medians and the margins and that is where Common Core will help
Education in America is in serious trouble, and Common Core will not fix it. The problems in American education go incredibly deep and the task is hard for reasons that most people don’t understand. A simple example: those high performing European and Asian educational systems do it in part by writing children off at an early age as too stupid for higher education. When you’re trained for a trade from elementary on, you bet you’ll be good at it, and if you wanted to try at being a lab researcher? Well, too bad for you. We don’t accept that sort of thing here, and we shouldn’t, but it makes the task a lot harder.
The bottom line: Common Core makes American education better at the margins for a lot of kids without making the problem worse. If we are going to have standards, they should be uniform standards – otherwise we get all of the downsides to standards and none of the upsides. America is not just a collection of states, it is a union. I think we all prefer the America where an unemployed worker in Michigan can take his family across the border to Ohio to get work without having to learn a new language and rules of the road. So why not give his son and daughter the same benefit for their classrooms?
Considering I live in a world where 5 dollar cups of coffee factor into my household budget (or soon will, once the Starbucks in my wife’s office building opens up) a 20 dollar year long subscription to the Dish shouldn’t an issue. Yet, my inner bean-counter is pretty unimpressed by the absurdity of coffee, and demanded an accounting. For those of you who don’t know, the Dish is the blogazine headed by Andrew Sullivan. The Dish relies on two sources of content: a carefully curated stream of the best reading on the web chosen by Sullivan and his team, and original opinion writing by Sullivan.
At the opening of 2008, Alan Jacobs described two Sullivans: a kindly, reasonable and fair-minded Dr. Jekyll, and a ravenous Mr. Hyde, with no patience, tolerance or human decency (my words) for those who disagree with him. I think it’s more useful to think of two Sullivans in the two roles he plays at the Dish: the Jekyll-like editor, a fair-minded thinker with impeccable taste and 50 years of life experience and the Hyde-like writer, an obsessively passionate advocate pounding the table, exactly as he did when he a young man at the New Republic.
Read more of this post
In these last couple weeks, I’ve been circling around a recurring theme of the complexities of responsibility for evil. When we talk about particular evils that are in the world, the stakes and baggage tends to cloud up our discussions, so I’d like turn to the weightless world of video games as a venue to examine evil and who is responsible for it.
In video game design, there is a lot of talk about designing games with emergent gameplay instead of curated gameplay. Curated gameplay is what most people think of when they think of a video games: game designers provide a top to bottom engineered experience, scripted to suit the beginning, middle, and end of the game’s story. When you play, say, Mario Bros., you run through the same levels, interacting with the same enemies, entering the same castles where your princess is still not available for rescue. Emergent gameplay, on the other hand, occurs when designers create a set of game mechanics and rules, and player interaction with those rules and each other causes complex game systems to emerge.
A particularly interesting example of emergent gameplay occurs within EVE Online, a MMPORG best described as a nightmarish combination of multiplayer Sid Meier’s Pirates! in space! and Microsoft Excel. Within the EVE Online game space there have emerged complex societal and financial transactions, specialized roles, and factions made entirely of players creating their own norms and behaviors, without the benefit of the computerized game to enforce them.1 That’s pretty amazing, but it comes with an enormous amount of bad, anti-social behavior, even virtual crimes. Players will often find their in-game avatars killed for the amusement of other players, have their assets stolen by supposed friends, and a whole host of advanced predation. It isn’t just virtual reputation and blood, sweat, and tears at stake either, virtual in-game cash is sufficiently fungible to turn into out-of-game currency.
The game designers respond to all of this predation by smiling and disclaiming responsibility.2 Perhaps this is disingenuous. After all, the designers of EVE Online chose to create a mostly lawless environment, and then they encouraged players to take advantage of it. Surely then, they have some sort of responsibility for the predators they enable. But, wouldn’t there also be a special sort of responsibility, perhaps even an intervening one, for the predators who take advantage of that lawless environment? Aren’t the designers of EVE Online less responsible for the emergent predation that they could not have foreseen compared to the ones they foresaw or even encouraged?
When I criticized Ta-Neisi Coates’ Case for Reparations, I focused on his vague, even incoherent, description of the reparations themselves. This incoherence stemmed from his treatment of the different sorts of predation he cataloged. From slavery, to redlining by Federal Housing Administration (FHA), to contract sellers, to rogue grand juries to lynchings, Coates never paused to dwell on the diversity of bad actors, treating sovereigns and mob members alike. When the contract sellers preyed on Black families in North Lawndale, was the city of Chicago (or the FHA, or the realtors or…) curating that evil, or did it emerge?3 The Case for Reparations clearly demonstrated that the FHA directly and maliciously harmed Blacks with redlining, and redlining gave rise to an environment where predators thrived. It is not clear however, that contract sellers were cultivated or merely emerged as an unhappy accident.
Emergent evils were at work in a different way during Elliot Rodger’s lethal rampage on a UC Santa Barbara sorority. Rodger was apparently spurred on by his misogyny and frustration with his “involuntary celibacy”. Rodger’s evil was emergent, doubly so. There is little doubt in my mind that Rodger was mad, but his madness filtered through a cultural substrate, colored, glossed, and tweaked by the particular sorts of horrors our society produces at its fringes.4 Just as the paranoid take unconscious inspiration from the news and TV shows to imagine themselves the unwitting stars of reality television, Rodger’s rage was stewed in misogyny and a toxic sort of masculinity. In response to Rodger’s attack on women, many women went online to share their perspectives and experience using the hashtag #YesAllWomen 5 The common thread that emerged throughout the tweets was an overwhelming sense of fear of predation by men. Not all men, but not any particular man or group of men either.
The Rogers of the world are not the fault of Patriarchal video-game-of-life designers using the Rogers of the world as their victim-assailants on women.6 The appearance of such a design is illusory, the result of invisible strands of culture taking hold as they tug, shift, and channel ideas, even with the supposed puppet masters of our society. The commonality of experiences do not indicate a commonality of cause, a conspiracy of predation. To what degree are the Rodgers of the world and other threats to women emergent and what to degree are they curated? That is the sort of question that doesn’t get answered much by those advocating social justice, and while I have plenty of uncharitable guesses as to why, the fairest explanation seems to be that from the victim’s perspective, whether predators emerged or were curated is pretty unimportant. The victimization happens either way, and whether implicitly or explicitly, social justice advocates are advocating on behalf of victims.
It does matter whether the threats from men described in the #YesAllWomen tweets were emergent or curated, and it matters whether the contract sellers emerged or were curated. Not just because that will shed light on who the villain, if any, of the tale is. If social justice advocates speak for the victims, and lawyers speak on behalf of the accused, it leaves the rest of us as third parties. Paying attention to whether evils are emergent gives an accurate and precise description of the how and why of the problem at hand. If you’re in the business of making the world a better place, an accurate and precise description of a problem puts you a well designed and implemented machine away from solving that problem.
That problem has to be solved. Both #YesAllWomen and the Case for Reparations drove home experiences held in common that have infected the very warp and woof of the daily life of too many people. Emergent evil is not satisfying theory of those crimes, and it is not meant to be. To recognize emergence is to recognize that very few are actually guilty. In fact, emergence can produce good as well as evil, so it also denies us many heroes. But if a theory of emergent evil denies an illusory justice for victims, it does not deny that there are victims. Abraham Joshua Heschel once said that “[f]ew are guilty, but all are responsible.” Emergence denies guilt, but it does not absolve us of our responsibility.
Accountability is a word that gets abused a lot in day to day life. Just in the news last week was the firing – sorry, resignation under pressure – of Secretary Eric Shinseki, just now formerly head of the Veteran’s Administration and before that, a little backwater post as the Army Chief of Staff. Now, I don’t know anything bout Shinseki except what I read, and what I’ve read suggest that most people think he was an honorable and impressive man trying to head a massive bureaucracy with systemic failures accumulating over the decades. Except in the most formal of senses, Shinseki was not at fault for what happened at the V.A., (or even there for the origin of these problems) it just happened to blow up on his watch. This happens a lot, and maybe it’s a good thing. But whether we are normal, everyday people or professional reporters, we have got to stop calling it accountability when the head of an organization is fired, – sorry, pressured to resign – without regard to their actual connection to the events at hand. That’s not accountability, just an illusion.
See Infra 
Recent Comments